Campers

Mita Williams

I am currently wrought with anxiety as I try to bring my various interests into a more coherent research programme. I'm interested in public space, public events, public writing, public softare, public games, and the publicness of libraries.

But, that being said, I'm also taken by the idea of the library as interface.

My Posts

I have a session idea and was curious if others are interested in it. Here’s my pitch:

We are all librarians now.

Our combined desktops, laptops, and ereaders contain thousands of thousand of texts, images, and sounds that we have to pay some attention to if we expect them to exist and persist over the next five, ten, or fifteen years. We can do this because those works are under our local control.

But what of the texts, images, and videos that we contribute to sites like Twitter and Facebook? These are readily available in the moment, but only weeks later they are increasingly difficult to find again and retrieve. What about the years of own correspondence that are hosted on institutional email servers? What about that amazing website that we bookmarked 3 years ago, but has disappeared sometime since then? Should we accept that our work is just a sand mandala?

I’m interested in learning more about the tools and approaches related to personal archiving. I was hoping we could share our own strategies that work and help each other around the roadblocks that stop us from capturing, preserving and re-using the digital artifacts and interesting detritus of our lives.